Lives at risk: public health in nineteenth-century Egypt

contrast to their medical activity, however, most barber-surgeons seem to have shrunk from major (and dangerous) surgical operations. Their lists of clients and patients reveal that they were consulted by the middle and upper classes of society, to which they themselves belonged according to stock books of their property. About one-third of the barber-surgeons held official posts, up to that of village mayor. Finally, Sander shows that their corporation was well-organized, although burdened with inner conflicts that arose from its members' financial interests and striving for prestige. This preoccupation with internal affairs made it easy for the Collegia medica (consisting of physicians-in-ordinary or medical professors) to carry through ordinances enhancing the academic physicians' control of the "craftsmen-surgeons". Sander interprets this as the beginning of the end of the barber-surgeons' trade. Totally abolished in the nineteenth century, it was one victim of the so-called professionalization of physicians.